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Bartlemy sighed. “He
ought
to know. It’s important. It may be relevant.”
    “To what?”
    “Trouble,” Bartlemy said. “Like last year.”

A s the light failed, Bartlemy moved round the living room, drawing the curtains. He was alone now except for the dog, who stood by one of the windows, staring through the latticed panes with cocked ears and a faint stirring of the hackles on his neck. When Bartlemy joined him, he thought he saw a movement outside—the branches of a nearby shrub twitched, new leaves shivered as if in the wake of something, but whatever it was, it had gone too swiftly for him to have even a glimpse of it. “Something small, I think,” Bartlemy mused. “Smaller than a human.” Hoover glanced up at his master, his shaggy face alarmingly intelligent. “Well, well,” Bartlemy said. “I see.”
    When the darkness deepened he swept the hearth and laid a fire that wasn’t made of coals. Presently pale flames leapt up, casting a flickering glow that played with the shadows rather than dispersing them. Bartlemy threw a powder on the flames, which smothered them into smoke. The chimney was blocked and the air in the room thickened, till the eyes of both man and dog grew red from the sting of it. Bartlemy began to speak, soft strange words that swirled the air and shaped the fume, sucking it into a kind of cloud that seemed to spin inward upon itself, until there was a shifting at the core, and the smoke cleared from an irregular space, and in the space was a picture. At first it looked like a television picture, only the definition was far better, but as it developed the perspective changed, until it was no longer smoke-deep but profound as reality, a peephole into another place. Sound followed image, and a draft came from it bearing the scent of roses. Bartlemy saw a woman in a garden cutting flowers. The garden was beautiful and the woman well dressed, but when she lifted her head her face was pinched and sad.
    Then the picture changed. Smoke-magic is wayward, unreliable; it can be encouraged but not controlled. The scenes that passed before him were fragmented, their meaning often obscure, with no logic in the sequence, no connecting thread—though Bartlemy knew that much later some connection might be revealed. After the garden the vision darkened. He saw a man whose hooked profile jutted beyond the overhang of his cowl, lit only by a furtive candle glimmer, head bent toward another and whispering, whispering, while his auditor, a dwarf with more beard than face, listened with dread in the twist of his brows. Bartlemy knew this must be Josevius Grimthorn, ancient warden of the Grail, who had died fourteen hundred years ago, and his henchman (or henchdwarf), a creature long imprisoned beneath Thornyhill Darkwood, until Nathan and Hazel, exploring in the valley, had accidentally freed him. Then came the cup itself, a chalice of polished stone, glowing green in a dim recess, and what appeared to be a gallery of those who had sought for it. The Jewish collector, starving in Dachau—the grandson of an SS officer, drowning in a rainstorm—an old woman, older than she looked, tangled in river weed—a greedy academic, clutching the wheel of a car, driven mad by phantoms who had eaten his mind. All insane, drowned, dead. And then those who had survived: Eric Rhindon, the purple-eyed exile from an alternative universe, Rowena Thorn, last descendant of a vanished family, Julian Epstein, the badger-haired man from Sotheby’s—and Nathan, who had brought the Grail back from another world so it could return to Rowena, its rightful guardian. And now Bartlemy held it in trust at Thornyhill, the house where her ancestors had lived, until the moment came for which it had been made—whenever that moment might be.
    There are three elements to a Great Spell: the female principle, the male principle, and the circle that binds. The Cup, the Sword, the Crown. Relics from a different Time, a different cosmos,